


The Empty World

by pyrrhocorax (mniotilta)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-01
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-27 14:22:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10024553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mniotilta/pseuds/pyrrhocorax
Summary: They both have these dreams about snowfall, of walls in all directions, of empty whiteness as far as the eye can see.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm hyper busy with work currently so I haven't been able to write, but I've decided to just do a bunch of writing exercises when I have time to get me in the habit of writing a little here and there instead of focusing on big writing projects. It's much more stream-of-conscious writing that I do when I'm half asleep.
> 
> Halvard is my name for Norway.

They both have these dreams about snowfall, of walls in all directions, of empty whiteness as far as the eye can see. In these dreams the horizon is drawn hastily, with a pencil, a gray outline that wavers with a shaky hand, grainy and indistinct, but sharp, a failed attempt at drawing a straight line. It feels as if here, you can physically see the tilted axis of the earth, the lopsidedness of the planet. They describe it the same way, eerily the same way, of how it doesn't feel clean here, but textured, that there is nothing to this featureless place other than the line far, far in the distance, and no matter how far they wander there’s nothing tangible, no variation.   
  
“Maybe I only thought it was snow because that is what I assumed it to be,” Halvard muses. “That I didn’t have the words to describe what I felt, what I saw, because I could only apply the sensations of my waking life to this place that wasn’t bound by those same rules. We can only describe our dreams to others in post-waking, draining and filtering those wordless experiences into associations. It was like this, it reminded me of this, but it wasn’t this. The world was white and empty, and the only whiteness I know is winter, the only emptiness I know is absence, and the dividing line serves a function: to let myself know that I am grounded, that there is some forced perspective that I must understand this place through.”   
  
“And what do you think that was” Ivan asks, “the function of that divide?”   
  
Halvard doesn’t know. He’s all theory with no answers.   


* * *

Throughout the summer this is all Ivan dreams about, or at least all that he remembers that he dreams about. Until the leaves start turning color in the real world the empty world is all that exists in his unconsciousness and only after he sweeps the leaves off his porch is he placed in other dreams, dreams that explore other topics, other colors, of fantasies and nightmares, and sometimes, Halvard is in those dreams, only a few of them, but it always gives him pause when he wakes.   


* * *

Halvard dreams of the empty world in the winter, once the trees are barren until the day they bloom, and he’s not sure what to make of it. Sometimes he wakes up and feels anxious about it but he doesn’t understand why. He keeps thinking about it even when he’s wide awake.    


* * *

“You don’t bleed in the empty world,” Ivan tells him, recalling a dream where he tried, digging his nails into his arm and waiting for color to appear, but there were no wounds upon his arm, no pain was felt, and that is when he realized that he himself wasn’t colored in the same way the world was, just faded charcoal drawn lines that smudged together. He tells Halvard this because he’s curious if their dreams follow the same rules. Halvard doesn’t know, he’s never tried, and when the first frost comes that winter and the dream rises again he tries to tear open his skin. There’s nothing, like Ivan said, and it leaves him perplexed, a little confused.   
  
It continues for years.

* * *

He coughs up blood and it falls out from between the fingers that cover his face and when it hits the floor of the empty world it leaks in harsh angles, each drop disobeys the laws of logic and streaks into the distance, each sharp vector fading from sight like painted borders on distant highways. Behind him, they go, weaving between his legs like a casting shadow, but when he wipes his mouth clean and turns around he is in the wrong light, his blood has reached the borderline of the world and rising out of the red river is an equally red half-mooned sun, a semicircle that shimmers and wavers like a candle weak-willed in the wind, like the sky, like the last moments of the sun before the earth swallows it whole.   
  
There are only ever two things: canvas, and the life spilled upon it.  
  
Every night Halvard finds a bit more color in his lungs and the red lines grow wider and wider until there’s nothing left.   


* * *

 

And in another empty world soon grows flowers, Ivan notices the horizon sags, it hangs with sharp underscores leaving not only color but impressions of physical violence, how stabbing a stack of paper with an inked pen still leaves indents three stories down, untouched, unreached, but impacted. And with every morning he awakes to the memory of more boldness, more growth, so quickly from nothing, and soon he cannot begin to count the fields of sunflowers that he finds himself drowning in when he awakes in these dreams. It is peaceful here, such slow progressions, there is no sky and he cannot feel the wind but the flowers move, turning the heads in the direction of a non-existing sun in the face of an empty sky, as if time moves on even when there is absence.   
  
Sometimes, when he enters his dreams and wakes up from consciousness, he swears that every flowered head is staring straight at him, as if he is the lightbearer, but then he blinks his eyes and he is no longer the center of the world.   
  
He catches glimpses of Halvard in the sea of sunflowers, an aberration in the field of yellow and brown, and when Halvard turns around he seems surprised, wide-eyed, but not helpless, and then he is gone.


End file.
